*chuckle* i just needed an excuse, a 'hook,' to start off this weblog, which i thought to write about The Professor and the Madman, which some of you are reading for AP English (the El Cerrito HS gang... Luis, Aaron, Quad, Bigi, Maris?). so, i dipped into the pix i took the other day when i went to SF-Oakland-SF on my trip to the innards of INSdom. i found this one, which i snapped as i emerged from the 12th Street City Center BART station in downtown Oaktown. this charming old coot was railing against the ungodliness of 'unlawful' sex. i didn't bother to ask him to explain it (nor did i want to peer too closely at the interstitial text and writing in between the large block letters). but i did ask him if it was okay for me to snap his picture and he quite willingly obliged. anyway, though i haven't finished it yet, i'm finding MadProf (as i shall refer to it from here on in) quite an engaging read. Kass also got it from Amazon.com yesterday, so now you ECHS guys have no reason to slack on the reading, and we're reading along with you just cuz we love you okay? ;-) Anyhow, feel free to IM either of us (blatantly presuming for Kass here! ^.^ ) if you wish to discuss anything in the book that somehow escapes your fine critical analysis. ;-) however, we are not, repeat NOT here to answer your questions for you. lol. just to provide another source for brainstorming and such.

there is a link, however tenuous, between our sexually abstemious OldCoot above and MadProf. and it's in the old-fashioned sentiment of his admonishment... he certainly wouldn't be out of place in Victorian London. anyway, i've already found a few serendipitous things about this whole MadProf reading thing. (ha.there's another one: the origins of serendipitous are explained in a chapter heading... i did know it already, i must say. hee-hee.) example: just last week, i was bragging to Tom Fletcher that i had access to the online Oxford English Dictionary (which is basically what MadProf is about), here on the UC Berkeley campus. the OED is, without a doubt, THE authority on English words, and i grew up with my nose buried in it a lot of the time. not that my family ever had one, but it seems like i spent my formative years in libraries, my favorite one being the United States Information Service library on Claveria Street, Davao City. Later on, in the 70s, Filipino leftist nationalists decried the USIS libraries as fomenters of capitalist ideas and a barely disguised front for the Central Intelligence Agency.

anyway, yes, the OED is available online here on the Berkeley campus, thanks to Cal's subscription to it. for a word maven like myself, this is pure etymological heaven. individual subscriptions cost $550 a year, which might seem outrageous, but for institutions, teachers, etc., that really is a bargain, particularly if schools pay for site licenses instead. it would have been way cool if the 'SAT Verbal' words i'm linking to here could be linked to OED instead of dictionary.com, but that's just not possible... the OED server apparently looks up hard-wired IP addresses on the local net of whichever institution subcribes to it. smart.

a last example of serendipity: the word absinthe appears early on in MadProf and, if you've been following the 'naming' or nicknaming shenanigans on this weblog lately, you'll know that that is more than just sheer coincidence. *chuckle* so, needless to say, i already LOVE MadProf (even as i'm only at the beginning of Chapter 4), and enthusiastically recommend it to anyone. even you, Spark. lol. it's a damn good detective story, among other things, as well as a first class historical account. if anyone wants it, and is short on allowance money to spare, do let me know and i'll bop right on over to amazon.com and send it you. k? alright then... until the next weblog.

{ net.casting }
^